Maev Kennedy Saturday 28 March 2015
Week of events to mark royal reinterment has been a spectacular success, winning city priceless publicity
The tomb of King Richard III in Leicester Cathedral. Photograph: Darren Staples/Reuters
Leicester’s week of sunshine and white roses will end in flames as darkness falls on Friday. A chain of lanterns and fire sculptures will be lit all around the medieval quarter where Richard III has moved across five centuries and 100 yards from car park to cathedral, from a roughly dug hole in the ground to a truly regal tomb.
The crowds came again to the cathedral, as they have come every day of an extraordinary week, for their first sight of the monumental tomb whose creation became one of the biggest events in the history of the city.
The 2.3-tonne block of Swaledale stone was lowered and sealed into place overnight on to the black limestone base inscribed with Richard’s name, dates and royal coat of arms. The coffin has been laid into the brick-lined vault so that the battle-scarred skull looks towards the great east window of the church. The stone is deeply slashed with a cross, so that the rising sun spills light through it.
Along with a set of rosary beads, and soil collected from Fotheringhay, where Richard was born in 1432, Middleham, where he lived, and Fenn Lane farm, the site of the battle where he died, every fragment of the remains found in the car park in 2012 has gone into the grave, including the leftover scraps of the samples taken for analysis. As far as the cathedral is concerned, this time Richard has been buried forever.
The events have been a spectacular success, astonishing even the organisers. The lasting effects for Leicester are harder to quantify. The coffin, the tomb, the reordering of the entire building to make space for it, and the week of services cost the cathedral £2.5m, and the bill is probably much more for work done in the city centre and county, for policing, local authorities’ time, highways work and all the other preparations that went into the week. The result won Leicester priceless publicity and exposure.
The Washington Post account of the day referred to “this charming city”, a description of a solidly real but not pretty place that might have raised eyebrows even in Leicester, before millions watched hours of live television relays of the medieval core transformed with restored buildings, new paving and landscaping, and the sun-drenched surrounding countryside and lovely villages.
The city has been packed with visitors, every hotel room occupied at high-season prices, at what would normally be the dead of the year. Even the tourists who couldn’t get tickets to the major services have been delighted. “The queue was part of the holiday,” said Amy Smithson from Virginia. “People were so friendly. I want to come back to see all the villages and the countryside next.”
White roses for sale near the queue to view the coffin of Richard III at Leicester Cathedral. Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA
The very success sparked a backlash, accusations that one of the most villainous monarchs in English history was being treated as a saint in a shrine, and his reburial as a carnival, despite the endlessly repeated motto “with dignity and honour”.
Robin Spencer, a medieval costumes merchant and re-enactor, resplendent in dark blue gown and bejewelled cap, his mobile phone in a tasselled leather pouch at his waist, said: “I’ve just been to bend the knee and pay my respects.”
He was having none of the vilification of either the king or – from his background in marketing – the money spent. “Richard was a good king whose memory has been traduced. He stood up for the rights of the common man, and that’s why the higher- ups hated him. As for the money, it was worth every penny spent, they’ve got publicity money couldn’t buy and it has put Leicester on the tourist map as never before.”
David Baldwin spent the week in a state of astonished joy. He was the historian who wrote in 1986 that, contrary to legend that Richard’s bones were thrown into the river Soar by a jeering mob, they still lay somewhere in the ruins of the lost Greyfriars church.
He was a small boy when he pleaded to be taken to see Laurence Olivier’s towering performance in the film of the Shakespeare play, and he was already fascinated by Richard then. “This week has been the culmination of a lifetime’s interest, but I have been astonished and touched by how many other people have come to share that interest,” he said.Human beings stepped out of the pages of history repeatedly during the week. On the eve of the reburial, newly traced descendants of men who fought on both sides at Bosworth met for the first time. “We’re Somerset 5,” said Sarah and Rachel Somerset, schoolgirls from Aberdeen, introducing themselves to Richard Burton from Bristol.
The Somersets are descendants of the Beaufort family, who trace their line through an illegitimate son of John of Gaunt, and Burton is descended from John of Hardwick, who may have changed the course of the battle of Bosworth by giving vital information on local terrain to Henry Tudor, including about the marshy ground that proved Richard’s downfall.
“It’s a great excuse for a party,” said James Babington Smith, a retired Ministry of Defence civil servant whose ancestors include John Babington, killed at Bosworth by a kinsman, probably settling a local property squabble rather than supporting Richard. The mild-mannered man in a grey pinstripe suit explained that another of his ancestors was hanged, drawn and quartered for backing Mary Queen of Scots in a rebellion against Elizabeth I.
Leicester Cathedral in the sunshine. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
The Rev Pete Hobson, who became project manager for the entire reinterment at the second poorest cathedral in England, said the good news was that it had raised all but about £200,000 of the £2.5m cost of the week – and that’s before all the donation envelopes discreetly passed around at the reburial service have been opened.
“If we were going to do it at all, we were going to do it properly,” Hobson said. “We weren’t going to go off half-cocked.”
Some at the cathedral, however, have not relished the hubbub. One verger, who has worked there for many years and asked not to be named, said: “I don’t go for all this Disney stuff. When the crowds have gone and the quiet returns, and we can welcome Richard into our midst as part of the everyday life of the cathedral, that’s when it really begins.”
Some will now be taking a well-earned rest, but the cathedral heads straight into the busiest period of the liturgical year, Eastertide. The dean, David Monteith, said the season had added poignancy to this strangest of events for a 21st-century church.
“As I placed ash on people at the start of Lent with the words ‘remember you are dust’, behind me lay an open grave for a king ready for burial. Beyond all the energy, public interest and controversy, I am confronted by his and my mortality. That seems a strange but energising gift,” he said.
“We will have to manage the cathedral differently to carve out some peace and quiet. But in a cathedral, the round of worship interrupts everything. We are forever returning to our primary identity as a house of prayer.
“This Easter will be so different for us. We will pray with two stories, a warrior king of high status from the battlefield alongside a servant king who called for a donkey rather than a horse and who did not retaliate when struck. There is hope out of defeat with both these stories, but of very different kinds.”
